This past Sunday, community-level elections (towns/cities and counties) were held here in Hessen. The results are in and they are, in a word, disturbing, but certainly not unexpected: there was a noticeable and unsettling shift to the populist right.
(For my American friends who live over on the right as a matter of course and who only have two party-candidates to choose from, these things don't make much sense. I understand that. In Germany, the general rule is proportional representation and any party accumulated 5% or more of the vote gets seats in the representative body. More often than not, no single party achieves an absolute majority (50+%) and so whoever wants to run the show needs to form a coalition with one or more of the other groups who had seats mandated by the election. The upside is that most often, extreme positions are tempered by necessary compromise; the downside is that if the coalition partners are close enough in program and ideology, you get things shoved down your throat anyway. Let's face it: democratic approaches are all problematic, but they're more problematic the fewer choices you have.)
All the established "people's parties" (that is, those that allegedly appeal to the broadest segments of the population), the Christian Democrats (CDU), the Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens (G) all took noticeable hits in their votes and seats. There was, once again, a lot of protest voting going, with voters seeking alternatives to the status quo. Though the Linke (the Leftists) showed moderate increases (even if they didn't manage to get over the 5% hurdle), the majority of "protestors" jumped to the right: moderately toward the Liberal Democrats (FDP), who managed to get back into the city and county councils where they had been voted out five years ago), moderately to the Free Voter Associations (a loose association of independents), but drastically to the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a right-populist party that comes of short of having to wear brown shirts wherever they go. It would seem, the scare tactics sown by the governmental and mainstream media (though the AfD calls the mainstream press the "liar press") have yielded fruit. In (too) many places, they garnered 10-15% of the seats.
The naivists among you will be grumbling that if that's the will of the people it needs to be respected, but as is so often the case, what the people want and what political parties want are very different things. Granted, I've not been everywhere and I've not experienced every possible democratic system going, but I've experienced three personally and I've got to hear a lot about a good number of other systems from people who are trying to come to terms with their own back home. What all of them have in common is this: the party comes first, the members come second, and everyone else doesn't matter at all; thank you for your votes, even if you were protesting, but you don't count in the end.
Politics, by its very nature, is about power, and as Lord Acton made clear: the more you have, the more you want and the worse off you are because of it. I firmly believe that we need ways to organize ourselves to ensure that our needs are met. The level of this organization has to be more than just the single individual or family. We're social creatures, so social organization is necessary. Whether we've got systems that ensure that, well, I only have to look at the latest community-level elections here or the circus they call the American primaries over there to convince me that we don't. We have systems that ensure the system-players' interests and power. That's it.
We've been repeatedly told how far we have advanced and how technologically savvy we are, how smart we are and how many options we have, but for some reason, we can't get past a political system that can't get out of the 17th century. I don't think that speaks very highly for any of us. And so we're all driven to feel -- and then believe -- that there's nothing we can do about any of it, so it would just be best if we would sit back and passively accept our fate. Unfortunately, as it appears that things are developing in America and the poke in the ribs we just got here in Hessen make me think that it's high time we put our thinking caps on. Those in power are looking to keep it; those who are tasting it for the first time are looking to keep it; those who lost a bit of theirs are looking to regain it, and the rest of us ... well, we're just going to be pushed aside unless we stand up for ourselves.
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